July 27, 2015

The Next President of the Philippines: Engineering the Economy

The last state of the nation address (July 27, 2015) of President “Nonoy” Aquino inspired many of viewers. The state of the nation highlighted the fight against corruption and the government projects – finished, ongoing, and for approval. As the term of one of the most love president in the country is nearing to an end, the question arises who will be the next? And what should be achieved in the next five years.

I firmly believed that the next president of the Philippines should be an engineer; a presidents who knows to engineer the economy; must know science and not only politics. The basic engineering model should be politics + (plus) economy. The new leader should be able to engineer the politics by continuing the fight against corruption and strengthening the relationship between national and local government. On one hand, he or she must be able to manage the economy very well. As the master engineer of the economy, each government project must be time bound and transparent; this means that all information about government projects should be public and the time line of all government projects must be shown to the public as well.

As we all know, the work of a serious president is not easy and would continue to be difficult especially in this era of economic development. Being a president is an honor and also being a leader with tons of responsibility. It easy to accept the responsibility of being a president especially when you are a charismatic person – yet having a concrete and specific plan in the next five years is sometimes forgotten.

The next president of the Philippines should not only know how to manage the country, but, he or she must also know how select the best economic plan for the country; the plan that would translate to greater economic growth and development - that will trickle down the bottom line of the society.

The next president should act fast – implement projects as fast as possible while continuing to manage politics. He or she must be able to utilize all the resources (human resources) he has to ensure that highest economic growth and development would be attained. The Philippine government has all the money to pay for all the government projects – we just need a systematic well engineered economic plan that could transform the current reality to better reality. The next president should act fast – because time is gold, the society needs a concrete solution to poverty (because many of Filipinos are still under poverty).

The write-up above is very demanding that is because, the work of a president is also demanding. If you want to become a president of the Philippines and you are not prepared and don’t have concrete time bound economic plan, then you better not run for president, because you will just waste the most precious resource that will be entrusted to you by the society – time.

I agree that there should be a concrete economic plan for the next five years. If there is concrete economic plan, the focus for the next five years would be on implementation. If the plan is created very well, there should be only few problem on execution. Budget is excluded from the problem, since the government has huge fund and there are development banks that can help.

There is another issue here - how sure are we that projects will be implemented properly? It goes back to the long process of evaluating contractors. In contrast, it should not take time if there are enough supply of project evaluators in the government. The project monitoring team has the balls for ensuring that the projects are properly executed from time to time. In the end, the auditing team will ensure that the projects are not over priced. This is my simplified scenario - but of course the reality has more complexity.

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